Sunday, May 12, 2013

Naturally, the pesticide and biotech industry players have come out swinging with a host of dire but false predictions that food prices will rise and the sky will fall if people are allowed to know what’s in our food. The latest evidence of desperation comes from a long-time GE apologist, who now claims that labeling GE foods in the U.S. will exacerbate world hunger and poverty. Seriously?

GE’s Broken Promises

When I got to the end of Robert Paarlberg’s latest pro-GE article in the Wall Street Journal — where he makes the acrobatic leap from labeling GE foods in the U.S. to world hunger — I literally shook my head and said, “Really, Rob?” My tone mirrored that of my 12 year old when he says, “Really, Mom?” if I make a particularly inane or utterly ridiculous (to his mind) comment.

Paarlberg’s reasoning is pretty opaque, but it seems to go like this: if we adopt GE labeling here, then developing country governments (he hypothesizes) would follow our lead, enthusiasm for importing our GE seeds would drop, and (here’s the leap) therefore people will go hungry.

A few quick points to set the record straight:• No one is waiting for U.S. leadership in labeling. Already 3 billion people in 64 countries have labeling, including numerous countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The U.S. is actually a latecomer to GE labeling.
• GE crops do not feed the world’s hungry. Instead, evidence shows us they have continually failed to deliver on industry’s promises of increasing yields, improving nutrition or enabling farmers to weather drought.
• Rather, GE crops fuel the growth engine of the pesticide industry, with virtually 100% of GE seeds on the market today designed to either contain an insecticide or to be used with herbicides. This has led to a massive increase in herbicide use and an epidemic of herbicide-resistant “superweeds.”

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Brett Wilcox

What's On My Food?

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GMO Health Concerns

According to the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, health risks associated with the consumption of genetically modified foods include "... infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system."

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Genetically engineered or modified organisms are engineered to withstand direct application of herbicide and sometimes to produce their own insecticide.

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Genetically modified plants are those in which a trait has been inserted from another plant or organism using biotechnology and not traditional breeding.

Corporate control over agriculture and over scientific research agendas is perhaps the most important issue underlying the debates over genetically engineered food.

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A genetically modified food comes from a plant or animal that has been genetically manipulated, usually by adding a gene from another organism, to give it desirable traits that can't be achieved through normal breeding.